Niche Website Tips

– Avoid targeting eCommerce keywords: The reason for this is because Google favors ranking actual eCommerce websites (Website that sell physical product like Amazon, eBay, etc.) for eCommerce related keywords. And example of an eCommerce keyword would be “buy camera.” As an alternative try experimenting with a prefex or suffix. For example changing the prefix to “best camera” may give you much different results. Or try adding a suffix like “camera review.” Again, a seed keyword like this may change your results to less eCommerce related results.

– Weakness in the top 10: When checking Google’s top 10 results to analyze your competition you want to see signs of weakness such as forum posts, question and answer websites, other niche websites, or other types of weak sites already ranking in the top 10 results. If you see this, you have a very good indicator that you can rank on the first page relatively easily. Of course, if you find a keyword that has almost all or only weak sites ranking in the top 10 on Google… guess what? Your are almost certain to rank in the top 10 with ease.

– At Least 1,500 Local Monthly Searches : Your niche site keyword should have at least 1,500 local monthly searches (Set to US for location). Go ahead an put this in your filter on whatever keyword tool you are using so you don’t waste your time browsing through keywords that will not bring you an adequate amount of traffic. 3,000 to 5,000 monthly local searches is an even better minimum but when you are working on your first few niche site it may be better to learn with keyword that has a smaller number of searches since they will typically have weaker competition than a keyword with a higher number of searches (not always the case though.)

– Pages within the top 10 results of Google that contain exact match keyword within the domain: For example if your keyword is “best canned beans” then take note of how many websites within the top 10 results on Google have best canned beans within their URL. For example Amazon.com/best-canned-bean or AbsoluteBestCannedBeans.com.

– Pages with a young site age: How many pages within the top 10 results of Google have a site age of 2 years or less. The more of these you see, the better a sign it is that you may beat the competition.

– At least $0.25 CPC (Cost Per Click) value: You actually want more around $1 dollar minimum CPC keywords to target however for the learning process you may want to accept a lower CPC and then increase your minimum acceptable CPC as you go along and get better at this.

– Multiple results within the top 10 with PA (Page Authority) of less than 30: This is a scale of 1 – 100 based off of SEOMoz.com. This metric measures a webpages ability to rank for arbitrary content, 1 being the least likely and 100 being the most likely. Lower numbered sites will be easier to beat so the more of these you see the better your chances of beating the competitions.

– Multiple results within the top 10 with less than 30 juice links: A juice link (another SEOMoz.com metric) is basically a quality back link likely from a more authoritative and higher page ranked source. You want to see several websites ranking with less than 30 juice links because this is another indicator of weak competition.